Selling my 1979 Mercedes 280SE at auction

Published July 22, 2023 · Updated September 15, 2024

I recently sold my 1979 Mercedes 280SE at the Shannons May 2023 auction. I’ve bought a couple of cars at auction, but never sold one before. This article covers my experience selling the car, why I chose and auction and why I chose Shannons.

Originally I started by trying to sell my 280SE privately. However, I had the issue that I have a fair amount of work travel in the first part of the year, and a fairly busy work and family schedule at other times. I missed out on a couple of buyers because they purchased something else before I could even show them the car.

As I was just about to embark on a 3 week work trip, I enquired about various auction options. As the car was in good shape and fairly original, plus a desirable colour I thought it would probably do reasonably well.

Potential buyers could go and look at the car at the auction house and then make a decision to bid or not.

Based on that, I considered a number of different auction providers:

Shannons
Lloyds
Grays
Collecting Cars

At the time, I didn’t really think about Trading Garage or Burns and Co. I probably should have.

I quickly ruled out Grays and Collecting Cars. The impression I have of Grays is that it is the place that people dump cars they can’t otherwise sell. I’ve also had stories from friends about the quality of the cars they had purchased from Grays. Given my car was a very nice original car, I didn’t think it was a good fit.

I also didn’t think the commercial model worked well with Collecting Cars. The minimum buyers premium is $1,000. This is an exorbitant amount of money for a car I expected to sell for around $10,000. I wouldn’t bid on a car unless I was getting it cheap as chips as I would feel I’m being ripped off. It might work well for cars at the $40-$50,000 range, but at that point I think the high value stuff goes through other auction houses anyway. Plus each auction runs in its own time so you don’t get the marketing impact of a regular auction date at a well publicized auction house.

That left Lloyds and Shannons. I went with Shannons because I felt they have the reputation as the auction house where the nice cars go through. They generally do good descriptions and take high resolution photos plus the mechanical report. The Lloyds descriptions are often one sentence and the photos are quite low resolution. I can’t remember the exact numbers but the fees were fairly comparable.

I also chose to go with a no reserve auction. I felt the exposure I would get through Shannons would give me enough exposure I would get a good market price. While I was hoping for $10,000, I felt I would easily get $8,000 if things went badly. I think reserve auctions put off buyers at the cheaper end of the market. The fees are much higher.

The sign up process was pretty easy and the Shannons employee I worked with was really helpful and was genuinely interested in the car and appreciated it. The showroom is in St Leonards which is reasonably simple for me to get to. I was able to drop off the car on the way to the city one day.

Once the car was there, Shannons took some very good high resolution photos of the car. The only criticism is that their watermark covers the middle of the photos, meaning it can he hard to zoom in and look at the details. They also do a mechanical report, which I think is a useful thing for bidders. I thought their report was reasonably fair, although like a 280SEL they had a previous auction, they noted the car as down on performance. I don’t think it actually was and they were comparing it to a non ADR27A car. ADR27A had a big impact on the performance of the M110.

Shannons don’t do an in person Auction anymore. The lots go live and bidding is open for a week. Like most Auctions, most of the bidding happens in the last 10 minutes or so that the lot is live. I normally find a general rule of thumb on these type of auctions is that the bid level will double in the last day of the auction.

The collector car market has really softened in the last 6 months or so. I went into the last day at $4100. This was below where I wanted to be, but not fatal. While my overall goal was to get a figure that would net me $10,000, I felt $8,000 while disappointing would at least be a tolerable result.

Some of the early auctions were doing quite well – then something happened that would change everything. The Shannons main website went down. This was a little after 6pm. It would remain down for the rest of the evening.

During this whole time, the Auction site was unaffected. The issue is that many people get to the auction site via the main website. I don’t know how many people this impacted, but certainly the lots that were scheduled for later in the evening had pretty poor results – worse than the ones scheduled earlier. In the end, I managed to scrape a result of $6,400. I hardly had any bidding right at the end.

I wasn’t alone. There were other cars going to equally low numbers around the time of mine. A great example was a rough R107 that went for $6,800. The car was rough, but that is a particularly low result. Neither of the Pagoda SLs got good numbers, and they are normally very popular cars. The W126 280SE couldn’t get any bids at all.

Shannons had one job to do that night. Keep their IT infrastructure up. A short outage of 10-15 minutes would have been inconsequential. But the hours long outage had a major impact. While the market is down, and I didn’t expect to get a number in the mid to high end of the guiding range, I felt my personal guiding range of $8-$11,000 was reasonable.

A great contrast was another 280SE sold by grays a couple of weeks earlier. This is a good comparison as both cars are sold under the same market conditions. The grays car actually got a slightly higher hammer price than mine, but there was a big gulf between the two cars. For example, compared to my car, the grays car was:

In materially worse condition, with various dents and scratches on the body work
A 1974 D-Jet car vs a 1979 K-Jet car.
Poorly optioned (no sunroof, crank windows)
Sold on grays vs Shannons

I pointed this out to Shannons and they agreed to waive the 7% commission. This puts me at an equivalent hammer price of around $6,850. Better, but I don’t think a realistic representation.

I think this outage cost me $1,000-$3,000. Based on my experience here, I won’t be sending another car to a Shannons auction. The front end process may be good, but if they can’t do the basics of keeping the IT infrastructure up on the night of the Auction, what is the point?